S3 bucket: how to create and work with it

The list of S3 bucket features

Amazon Web Services provides a wide set of features for Amazon S3 buckets. The list includes such things as:

• Version Control – allows you to store multiple versions of an object in one bucket. It can also be turned on whenever you want.
• Server Access Logging – provides detailed records for requests going into the S3 bucket and can be useful for security and access checks. However, logs will increase storage bills.
• Tags – allows to track bucket costs.
• Object-level logging – records object-level API actions using AWS CloudTrail at additional cost.
• Default Encryption – automatically encrypts objects as they are stored in Amazon S3. Data will be protected during transport (when it moves to and from the Amazon S3 bucket) and at rest (while it is stored on disks in Amazon S3).
• Advanced settings – permanently allow blocking of objects in this S3 bucket.
• Management – allows you to monitor requests in your bucket for an additional fee.

S3 bucket name: list of restrictions

There are several restrictions you should take into account when naming buckets. Keep in mind the following rules in order to avoid difficulties:

• Names can contain only lowercase letters, numbers, periods, underscores, and hyphens. The initial character of the name must be a letter or number.
• The name must not be in the style of an IP address (in other words, names like 10.0.0.1 are not allowed).
• The name must be at least 3 and no more than 255 characters long.

Amazon offers the following bucket naming conventions that will allow you to create valid and correct S3 bucket URL for your S3 objects:

• Do not create bucket names that include underscores (although this is officially allowed).
• Ideally, it is best to limit the length of a name to 63 characters.
• You should not create bucket names that end with a hyphen, and you should also avoid situations where the name is followed by a hyphen.

S3 bucket limits and pricing

Amazon uses a regression scale: the more you host, the cheaper a gigabyte of storage costs. Besides that, you will have to pay separately for traffic, as well as requests to access objects ($ 0.01 per 1000 requests). To immediately understand how much you will be spending, you can use a special calculator.

By the way, you can create 100 S3 buckets for each of your accounts. However, this number is not a limit and can be increased at your request. As for the number of objects uploaded to S3 bucket, it is unlimited.

CloudMounter – an easy way to mount your S3 bucket

Unfortunately, without the help of third-party tools, you cannot mount S3 storage to your computer and deal with Amazon S3 buckets as with local folders. CloudMounter comes to the rescue here. You can choose whether to mount just one S3 bucket or several of them or even the entire Amazon Web Services account. Besides that, the app supports all AWS regions. In addition to being a perfect S3 client, the app works with a lot of other popular cloud computing services as well as remote servers.

Working with Amazon Simple Storage Service via CloudMounter is very simple. You can upload files, download files, copy public and protected URL of your files. The only nuance is that it does not use a login/password for identification, but a pair of ID / private key, which you must obtain in the administration panel of Amazon services. Check this app and see what else it can offer you.

As you see, all files are stored as an object in the Amazon S3 bucket. You can create multiple buckets; each bucket acts as a storage container. When you upload files to the bucket, you can set permission on the object and its data and determine who can access them. In addition, you can create AWS accounts in IAM, and determine who can create groups, upload or modify data.